The statistics are overwhelming.

• Parental literacy is one of the single most important indicators of a child's success.  The National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) has concluded that youngsters whose parents are functionally illiterate are twice as likely to be functionally illiterate themselves.
• By age four, children who live in poor families will have heard 32 million fewer words than children living in professional families.
• One in five, or 20%, of America's children five years old and under live in poverty.
• Some 30 million adults in the United States have extremely limited literacy skills.  If one teacher could teach 100 adults to read, we would need 300,000 adult education teachers to meet this need.
• The Hispanic population is the largest minority in the United States and has the highest school dropout rate. More than two in five Hispanics living in America age 25 and older have not graduated from high school.

NCFL firmly believes that literacy and education are the cornerstones of the nation's well-being. Please join us in our efforts to eradicate the intergenerational cycle of low literacy and poverty.

Use the links on the left to learn about NCFL's family literacy approach and find out how you can become involved in the literacy initiatives in your community to support adults' and children's literacy and language development.